Five ways to shift your thinking & deliver the most valuable solutions

1. Focus on the customer friction, not on the feature

When addressing a change to the product, we often think about the feature that needs to be fixed. Instead, taking a step back and think about it as a solution to fix a users problem. This change in perspective can help arrive to a more valuable and sustainable outcome, that could even go beyond the original feature. Skies the limit.

2. Focus on small iterative solutions, not on large impacts

There is user friction in your product. You collect feedback to better understand what is going on, get all stakeholders involved and the creative juices start flowing. It is exciting to think of big, innovative, impactful solutions that could possibly be just what your end users need. But going all in can be dangerous and not scalable. Instead of going for the whole shabang, break it down and think how you can deliver immediate value. Don't confuse this with not thinking big, just think of it as a way to realistically arrive to those big grandioso ideas.

3. Focus on multidisciplinary teams, not on silos

If you are only brainstorming with others that have your same background and role, you know you are doing something wrong. You are likely going to miss something and arrive to a biased conclusion, only to find yourself having to start at square one because of not taking into consideration an important input or limitation. It can be hard to mix professional points of view between devs, product, designers, AI, sales ect. Everyone has a specific goal but in the end you need to understand that your agenda is the same.

4. Focus on co-creation, not on hand offs

This points ties together with the third point but I think it is important to highlight. The handoff can give you an exciting and important finish line feeling. Like great, now it is your responsibility, I am moving on. But I am going to say it again, this is dangerous. It feeds into the silos method and carves away at the beauty of multidisciplinary teams. Instead of product handing off requirements to designers and designers handing off to developers try putting the focus on collaboratively designing together.

5. Focus on the whole, not on the occurrence

You are churning out iterative ideas, each time getting closer to the strongest solution with hi fidelity design only to realize that somewhere else in the product a similar behavior is experienced completely differently. Remember that features are not stand alone, they are part of a bigger system of events. Providing similar but different expectations in a product conveys mistrust and friction, which can result in your end users going somewhere else and slowing down delivery. If you don't invest in the core foundation, cracks will start to show.